Believe it or not: on trust in business

For some reason I think it would be banal to write that in busi­ness you shouldn’t trust anyone. Trust but verify, and so on: we’ve all heard it. I per­son­ally have heard it all my life from my par­ents, who “went through” busi­ness in the ’90s. Once, in the heat of the moment, I even told them they’d been trau­ma­tized by that era and saw a catch where there wasn’t one.

By how much they trust others in busi­ness, all people can be roughly divided into two categories:

  1. Trust no one. That is, trust, but only people who’ve proven them­selves (prefer­ably people close to you).
  2. Trust every­one by default.

The first group (my par­ents among them) will tell you: “Anyone you have to deal with can deceive you (or simply act in the way that ben­e­fits them, at your expense).”

The second group (where I’ve counted myself until now) trusts people in gen­eral and treats with cau­tion only those who’ve shown them­selves unreliable. Such trust­ing and fool­ish people are quite likely to end up dis­ap­pointed, and may even move over to the first group. But imag­ine how much easier it would be to work if every side acted on the prin­ci­ples of the second group!

Each of these posi­tions has its pros and cons. In the first case you’re better pro­tected, but you may miss good oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow. In the second, which you could call the more active posi­tion, you move (grow) faster, but you also take more knocks.

It would be far more impres­sive if I wrote that, well, every­one teaches cau­tion and reli­a­bil­ity, but I’m offer­ing you a dif­fer­ent, more open and modern posi­tion: trust every­one until there’s a reason not to. Now that’s real Funky Business! Hallelujah!

But real­ity isn’t as impres­sive as the busi­ness preach­ers like to make out. (Though that’s part of its charm…) Every day at work you run into sit­u­a­tions where some­one treats you badly. I think it’s far from always intentional. It’s just that the nature of busi­ness rela­tion­ships is such that all the play­ers have oppos­ing interests. Not every­thing that hurts you was done for that purpose. And some­times one big step for­ward may require trust­ing a stranger. Sometimes it works, and you take that step…

Bottom line: luck­ily, we have at least two extremes and a hun­dred thou­sand golden means. All that’s left is to twist off the cap and find yours…